Artificial Intelligence and Scholarly Publication in Foot & Ankle International and Foot & Ankle Orthopaedics

The role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as Large Language Models (LLM) in scholarly publications is a topic of much discussion. LLMs are backed by substantial funding and technical expertise and linked to previously unavailable computing power and extremely large databases. LLMs have many applications in scholarly publications such as comprehensive search engines, data and image processing, content organization and writing, and manuscript editing and review including peer review. This technology is rapidly evolving but at this time there are still ongoing concerns with the use of LLM models. These models are known to generate inaccurate information (hallucinations), create data, or extract data and text from other sources (LLM plagiarism). Manuscripts created by or uploading into LLMs also become part of massive databases with unknown future uses by LLM programs.

As noted in the Submission Guidelines, both FAI and FAO will follow the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Editors and the general consensus of orthopaedic journals as well as recommendations from other scientific journals.^{1 -3}

All use of AI-based tools in the research and/or content preparation of a manuscript must be disclosed in detail in the Materials and Methods sections.

Authors (and researchers) must be accountable for the accuracy and veracity of their work. The contributions of all authors should be noted, and the senior author is responsible for verifying these contributions. Work done by others must be acknowledged and appropriate permission obtained for its use. Current AI/LLM models cannot comply with these requirements and therefore cannot be listed as an author.

The use of AI/LLM for peer review is being evaluated by many scientific publications. Neither FAI nor FAO currently approve of this use. If AI tools are used in the future for peer review, this will need to be done with editorial and publisher oversight as well as disclosure to the manuscript authors and journal readers.

Robert A. Vander Griend, MDJohn T. Campbell, MDChristopher P. Chiodo, MDThomas O. Clanton, MDGeorge B. Holmes Jr, MDEllie Pinsker, PhDStefan Rammelt, MD, PhDCharles L. Saltzman, MD